- Pioneers in Education. Emma Willard (1787-1870) believed equal educational opportunities for women required state support rather than relying on private funding. Troy Seminary (started 1821), later Emma Willard School, was unique in its well qualified faculty and varied instruction, including astronomy, physics, and physiology. The sciences were applied, which was unusual even for men’s schools. When she didn’t have the necessary books, she wrote them, and many became standard texts of the day. Rich and poor were admitted, and she gave scholarships to many girls. One pupil, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wrote of Emma Willard in her memoirs, “She was a splendid looking woman . . . and I doubt whether any Page 88 →royal personage in the old world could have received her worshippers with more grace and dignity than did this far-famed daughter of the Republic . . ..” Prudence Crandall (1803-1890). A Quaker, Crandall worked for abolition, temperance and woman suffrage. As a teacher in Canterbury, Conn., she opened a boarding school for girls which in 1833 she changed to an all-Negro girls’ school. The outraged town used violence and legal action against the school, cut off supplies, poisoned the water and made threats of personal violence. Abolitionists supported her with money, and the story was published in William Lloyd Garrison’s “The Liberator” and other papers. The students were devoted to Crandall, but the mob assaults became unbearable, and in 1834 she was forced to close the school. Even so, the school was a landmark in the struggle to extend elementary education to young black females. Crandall was quite well read and inquisitive, and in her “83rd year she is vigorous in mind and body, having been able to deliver the last 4th of July oration at Elk Falls. Kansas, where she now lives and advocates woman suffrage and temperance.” (History of the Woman Suffrage Movement.) Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), the 15th child of former slaves, was determined from childhood to provide an education for herself and other blacks, against overwhelming odds. A Quaker seamstress in Colorado sent funds for one scholarship to the country schoolhouse where Bethune was a pupil. She was chosen and attended Scotia Seminary and Moody Bible Institute. Disappointed in her ambitions to become a missionary in Africa, she returned to her native South and eventually started classes for children with no funds, beginning in a city dump. Bethune’s energy and powerful personality won the support of the rich and influential, and by 1923 her school was Page 89 →merged with another to become Bethune-Cookman College. Bethune was appointed to many government posts, held 7 honorary doctorates, and was a consultant for the drafting of the U.N. Charter.
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